Resident Evil 6: The Mercenaries

With the release of Assassin's Creed, WWE 13 and Halo for in the past few weeks, gamers are probably not sure where to devote their time. Capcom played it smart waiting until now to lock back in faithful dead with the release of new maps for The Mercenaries.

Depening on where you pre ordered your game, you may have gotten 1 of the 3 new maps along with the title. For those of you who waited until on or after release date, you probably didn't get any. Now, all 6 maps are available for any user straight from the new and improved PSN store.

The Mercenaries is a time attack game that has been around for a few of the past Resident Evil titles that can be played solo, split screen or online. The game starts off players with 2 minutes and the goal is to kill as many bad guys as possible in the time. Throughout each level you grab extra time bonuses to increase the amount of seconds you have to slaughter your enemies.

The game starts with one map and two others can be unlocked by completing Chris and Jake's campaign. As stated before, the other 3 are available for download from the store but were also giveaways depending if and where you preordered your copy from.

The Mercenaries allows you to use 8 characters, 3 by default and 5 others are unlockable through the campaign and through your performance in The Mercenaries itself.

Urban Chaos is the first level and arguably the easiest to progress through. Smaller than the rest, the time extensions are easy to find and finding a place to back yourself against a wall and let the undead come to you is fairly easy. Herbs are also easy to find which makes staying healthy pretty easy. Zombies are the main bad guy of this stage and also roam in the Catacombs and Mining Depths while the J'avo are all over the Rail Yard, Steel Beast and High Sea Fortress.

Because I personally enjoy zombies more, the Catacombs and Urban Chaos are easily my favorite stages.

The time increase are gold bars that you can break while you may come across some green ones too. They allow you to have a small window where all the amount of points for each kill in the duration is multiplied by 1000, so wait to break these until you are sure that you have a slew of targets you can easily pick off.

Each character comes equipped with different weapons and aids. While Chris is still my favorite with a machine gun, magnum and knife with no health, I also enjoy Sherry who has a triple shot handgun, magnum and stun rod with two red herbs waiting to be mixed.

The ranking system is based on the amount of points your character gets during the time. Points are collected by killing the evil beings and is greatly increased when a combo is created (Personal Best: 93). To create a combo kill a bad guy and within 15 seconds kill another. May sound easy but when the clock is draining and the bad guys are hiding, it becomes a little more difficult!

The Mercenaries also allows players to pick up more skill points which can be redeemed for things within The Mercenaries like item drop increases or extra time and can also be used for things related to the campaign.

The Mercenaries gives Resident Evil 6 even more replay value. Once I finished everything solo, I went online and it was like starting all over again. Worthy of being a game on its own (and I think it already was) The Mercenaries mini-game is enough to keep you glued to your seat for weeks after you finish the campaign.

Until next time, keep killing those zombies!